Sex in the Snow: Canadian Social Values at the End of the Millennium

Graeme S. Mount is a professor of history at Laurentian University, the
author of Canada’s Enemies: Spies and Spying in the Peaceable Kingdom,
and the co-author of The Border at Sault Ste. Marie.

Michael Adams is a market researcher and president of Environmental
Research Group Ltd. In this book, the 50-year-old Adams maintains that
Canada’s generation gaps are more significant than French/English
differences. He divides Canadians into three groups based on their age.

Elders, defined as people over 50, tend to be guided by caution and to
espouse traditional values. Baby boomers, born between the mid-1940s and
the mid-1960s, are less deferential toward authority. (The boomer author
helped Dalton Camp overthrow that quintessential authority figure, John
Diefenbaker.) In contrast to the previous generation, they are
interested in reforming (as opposed to restoring) Canada’s traditional
institutions. Generation Xers, born between the mid-1960s and the early
1980s, find those institutions irrelevant. They seek instant
gratification on all fronts and do not fear hell, or indeed, believe in
its existence. They are not savers like their elders.

Finally, Adams compares Canadians and Americans. Canadians are more
rebellious, he says. No longer a nation of “repressed hedonists,” we
behave like children on the last day of school.

Despite the title and the absence of an index, this is a serious book,
replete with sociological jargon. Social planners should read it.